Superman Disassembled

(You may as well get settled in, if you plan on riding this one to the end. A quick scan down will show you that my ambitions for your attention span may well outstrip your level of commitment. Consider yourself warned.)

I do all my best thinking while driving.

I’m not alone in this; there is something about a long drive down a straight highway that activates the contemplation circuits. It’s a kind of gentle, enforced modern meditation. I am, however, one of those people who, when confronted with a sticky problem, will actually leave and go for a drive to sort it out.

It was on one such drive, several years back, that I got to thinking about Superman.

This was on a spectacularly long drive, four hours between Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle, WA. On such a drive, one has a chance to take an idea and turn it over and over in your mind, until it spins, and you can begin to shape it, carve away at it, as you would a dowel humming away in a lathe.

On this trip, I was turning over in my mind the fact that Superman bugs me. And I had a good long time to think about why.

Consider what you have with the Man O’ Steel.

He is (as far as we can tell) the closest thing to completely invunerable as any creature can get, short of actually having no weaknesses. He takes the most egregious kind of poundings, gets back up, keeps coming, and never relents. In fact, most types of assault simply glance off of him, ineffectual-like.

And this… this… is what bothers me.

Most of what I have learned in this life (small though that sum may be) I have learned through receiving and contemplating the painful consequences to the actions I have taken. I often think that my life can largely be described by the long chain of mistakes I have made, and the course corrections I have taken in response to those mistakes.

I am not exceptional in this. It is safe to say that this is one of the Ways of life itself. Pain exists as a way for creatures (sentient or otherwise) to condition themselves to avoid behavors that will damage them, in an ever-changing environment. Yep. Pretty sure about this one.

So, what we have here, then, is a creature who, at least as far as physical feedback goes, has no way of receiving negative reinforcement. He, simply, cannot learn through pain.

What would that do to someone?

(We don’t really know. But, there are, at the very least, ideas about this floating around the American myth and story gestalt… Since we are talking about a fictional character, let’s accept these baseless fictional ideas as fact. Lawmakers do it all the time, why can’t we?)

Absence of pain stunts the development of empathy in the poor afflicted sod. It’s simple: if you, yourself, can’t feel pain, then you can’t imagine what pain someone else is experiencing, which is empathy.

So, of course, being utterly invulnerable, Superman would of course become an utter sociopath, and, since he is a) unstoppable, b) inhumanly powerful, and c) from another goddamn planet, he would, of course, rise up, claim the world as his own, and rule it in whatever depraved manner he sees fit.

Right?

Except he didn’t. Not even close.

Instead, he became humanity’s savior, a paragon of virtue, and defender of every goddamn thing within his remarkably broad reach.

So, the question I have is how?? How did this happen??

Let’s look at the facts. Superman apologists (you know who you are, you flag-waving tree huggers) generally tell us about two major factors in the development of this goody-two-shoes approach to demigod status:

The training the young Kal-El (Supes, for those not in the ultra-geek squad) was given while in the escape pod he was carried to earth in;

Let’s talk about each of these briefly, and then discuss what this startling declaration must mean.

Training Pod

The idea here is that the escape pod Superman’s parents put him in to carry him away from his dying planet contained within it some pretty fucking bitchin’ technology and design, and that, over the course of his long, long journey to Earth, it stuffed his head full of understanding about the universe and the planet that he was travelling to.

In most presentations, this is basically a recording talking to a baby Kal-El floating in a sphere, which would make me a dead Kal-El from confinement, boredom, and physical inactivity within a month. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the Krypton Recreation & Instructional Bureau was a well-financed and well-regulated governmental body, and that they put some brains on the job of building that darn pod. Nerds, I mean. The really geeky ones, like the ones who stuffed the computational power of the entire planet in 1972 into the computer with which you are reading this drivel, bored silly and impatient with me to get to the goddamn point.

Hang on. We’re almost there.

So, let’s assume that this was a really good teaching machine he was in. Okay, cool. Kal-El (who quickly became the young Clark Kent) got his brain all stuffed full with information and detail about where he was going, how stuff worked, and how his parents expected him to behave.

They brainwashed him pretty good. Yep.

Ma and Pa

All right, so now we meet the second major influence: the Kents.

Before we swallow this pill, let’s again consider what we’ve got here. We have a young boy, utterly brainwashed by his parents in a space machine to earth, who has had no real-world experience at all, until he crashlands in a wheat field in Kansas. We can assume that there was some kind of physical simulation stuff in the training pod, so he’s not emerging like some kind of blank slate; he’s a healthy Kryptonian boy of six. Or however old he was. However, he’s never actually done anything real.

Enter the Kents: two kind, gentle, rugged, apple pie American folken, looking for a kid. And, one just dropped into their back yard. Fine.

However.

This boy of theirs could crush their torsos accidentally if he sneezed while giving them a hug. If startled at the wrong moment and lets fly, he could knock one of them into the next county.

This is not your usual kid.

Now, let’s talk quickly about children. The parental relationship is based on many things: experience, love, relation, community… and, also, physicality. It is true that part of the reason that kids have to do what their parents tell them to (especially when they are young) is that, deep down, they know that the parents can just pick them up and put them in the goddamn car, if they had to. Many kids know this, and never test it. Some test it. Some test it constantly. But it is most certainly one part of the web that keeps children from destroying their parents. And, darn tootin’!

This was not the case with the Kents. Oh no. If the young Clark got it in his head to, he was gonna have that goddamn plushy Scooby-Doo, and that would pretty much be that. Yep.

And Therefore…

We must assume, then, that as Clark grew from child to hormonally-posessed teenager to superheroic adult, one of two things occurred. Either:

The young Clark Kent never tested his parents authority, or

If he did test his parents, his behavior was successfully shut down based exclusively on verbal and emotional feedback. Every time.

Let me say that again, because it’s the basis of the point I’ve brought you all the way down this long, long, page of small white text to make.

Clark Kent either never genuinely rebelled, or if he did, he was talked out of it, every time.

Now, he would certainly not be alone in this. There are many people out there who, when they were youngins, tested the boundaries of their social territory in only the most casual way, and for whom a firm talking to was plenty to curb their behavior. (I think it would, however, not be a stretch to theorise that few of these kind of folk grow up to fight villains for a living, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

That said, it’s important to not forget that this creature who quietly accepted the boundaries he was given is someone who has no possible way to receive any negative physical consequences for his actions. You can’t incarcerate him. You can’t prevent him from taking something he wants. He can move fast enough to appear to vanish. It is trivial beyond words for him to demonstrate his physical superiority. You ultimately have to depend on his own internal systems to prevent him from defying you.

And, lo, he’s the most powerful creature on the planet. None can oppose him, and it is safe to say that he was vastly stronger, faster, and smarter than everyone he ever knew when he was growing up.

WTF? What is going on inside that head of his?

Now that we are here, I can finally say what I’ve wanted to say all along, and I think, given all that we’ve been through together, you’ll understand what I mean when I say it.

Ready?

…

Superman is stupid.

Like, dumb-as-a-post stupid. Head full of rocks. What kind of a mind would never, ever test the boundaries of his social web, when the potential reward for succeeding could well be rulership of anything you wanted?

Even worse, the mind that made this choice was a mind with strong leadership tendencies, and the broad desire to have a world-wide impact on the lives of humanity. What sort of person would wield such broad ambitions, such vast power, and yet live strictly within the gentlest of restraints, never once testing them for their strength?

…well, that you’d have the ultimate pawn for some national power, wouldn’t you? Hmm.

Hmmmmmmmmmm, indeed.

So, in the end, the thing that bugs me about Superman is his utter lack of vision, and his willingness to simply accept what was put in front of him at face value. It would be easier to swallow, I think, if he even once struggled with this problem. If he had ever expressed uncertainty about what he was doing given who he was. If he had demonstrated for a single moment that he was capable of seeing his position in the universe from an objective position, instead of from an absolute one.

It’s absurd. The bullets bouncing off I can accept. Inability to view the world as it is? Unacceptable.

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

3 Comments

you see i dont think he was stupid. insufferably boring and possessing no ambition what so ever, yes. but not stupid. he just didnt care about humanity. thats why he bacame a hero.

most heroes are heroes for selfless or vindictive purposes, his reasoning was neither of these. he was just bored and needed something to do that afforded him no oppurtunity for advancement or real responsibility. a villian has the pressure of constantly one-upping himself, the next atrocity more atrocious than the last. for supes that would eventually mean the domination of the entire galaxy, at least all thats in reach of our yellow sun, and any other yellow sunned galaxy, shit if you take the mythologies of the cartoons into account, vandal savage built a generator that produced a radiation similar enough to our sun that it was able to completely restore supermans powers on a red sunned future earth. so theoretically he would be near unstoppable anywhere. thats a huge weight to carry on your shoulders, with power like that you would have to deal with real enemies. you would actually have to do…well…stuff.

so he chose the easy route. he became a hero for a people that are so much weaker than him that they would be horribly easy to keep from harm but if he happened to fail, heh, what the fuck are they gonna do about it. he chose to battle singular menaces who truly pose no threat to him, never actually eliminating them when he could do so and actually save humanity from there wraith time and time again. he allowed villians to basically run free so he had something to do when he wasnt taking pictures. so i think he views the world exactly as america teaches us to; do as little as possible just make sure you look good doing it.

Drew has hit it closer to the mark, I think, than the darklord, which, when you consider the juxtaposition of said christ-figure against dark-lord, makes a lot of sense.

The thing that makes supe tolerable, perhaps even cool, is that he is an unstoppable, irresistable, immortal, near god-like thing that – duh-duh-duh – is actually a good guy.

He could easily be a bad guy. It would be simple. It would be trivial. All hail King Kal! Only he chose to be a defender of a good; a self-sacrificing nerd; a super-hero.

Now, the thing is (and its been mentioned before), his choice to fight crime really shouldn’t earn him any praise. He’s really not risking much; they guy can’t really be hurt. But the fact that he does chose to be a hero, rather than a villain, becomes an inspirational model.

It’s always been an important part of the Supe-story that Supe came from another planet — I think that’s key to his believability (suspension-of-disbelief-ability?). You know that a human, given similar powers, would just not be like Supe. But an alium, now they might have sterner mental/emotional/social stuff that’s going to let them live alone, basically socially isolated forever, and still turn out to be the kind of person you’d invite over for dinner.

Supe’s story is basically one of repeated temptation — he can do anything. Pretty much absolutely anything (one of the reasons the actual per-issue-plot lines of Supe always bored the begezzus out of me) and each and every moment he does the moral thing, the beneficial thing, the fair thing, the right thing, the heroic thing. He’s a self-sacrificing, self-denying, really-a-big-geek-but-not-really-stupid mild mannered reporter.

Yeah, I’ve had my suspicions about our good ol’ buddy Clark ever since I read about the fate of Doc Manhatten from the Watchmen.

Speaking of Superman, I’m sitting in the movie theater the other day (watching ‘V’) and they play the trailer for the new Superman. They’re playing the music from the original Chris Reeve superman movie, and it’s awesome. And as I’m sitting there, listening to Jor-El wax philosophic about how great Humanity could be, and how they just need someone to show them the way, and that’s why he’s sending us his son…it finally hits me that it’s the story of Christ.

Uh, I mean, the story of Christ, as it would be if he were a two-fisted crime fighter with x-ray vision, instead of yet another peace-lovin’ hippie beaten down by The Man.

This Is A Custom Widget

This Sliding Bar can be switched on or off in theme options, and can take any widget you throw at it or even fill it with your custom HTML Code. Its perfect for grabbing the attention of your viewers. Choose between 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns, set the background color, widget divider color, activate transparency, a top border or fully disable it on desktop and mobile.

This Is A Custom Widget

This Sliding Bar can be switched on or off in theme options, and can take any widget you throw at it or even fill it with your custom HTML Code. Its perfect for grabbing the attention of your viewers. Choose between 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns, set the background color, widget divider color, activate transparency, a top border or fully disable it on desktop and mobile.